


re-conditioning

by novoaa1



Series: the art of becoming [1]
Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV), Marvel, Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: BAMF Natasha Romanov, Blood and Injury, Domestic, Implied/Referenced Brainwashing, Implied/Referenced Torture, Kid Natasha Romanov, Knife Throwing, Like a year after, Movie Night, Multi, Natasha Romanov Needs a Hug, Natasha Romanov-centric, POV Melinda May, Post-Captain America: Civil War (Movie), Protective Melinda May, Red Room (Marvel), Tahiti (Agents of SHIELD), Tony Stark Has A Heart, Winter Soldier Bucky Barnes, and Tony helps, coloring!, fury making questionable calls, it's mild though, kid nat also doesnt, kid nat not understanding why tony and melinda want her to do normal healthy things like sleep, like co-parenting i guess? even though theyre not together?, melinda developing a semi-parental bond with kid natasha, melinda may hates undercover, night night gun!, s.h.i.e.l.d. not necessarily being the good guys, tony stark doesnt like sleeping, young natasha romanov
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-23
Updated: 2020-06-23
Packaged: 2021-03-03 21:41:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 15,290
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24872470
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/novoaa1/pseuds/novoaa1
Summary: Stark made a face. “You do realize that you are, quite literally, an actual child?”“I am not a child,” she protested monotonously, though Melinda could hear the frustration simmering beneath her lackluster tone. "I am a Widow.”“If it walks like a duck and quacks like duck, it’s a freaking duck,” Stark shot back impatiently.“I am a Widow,” the girl defended, easily contesting Stark's vigor. “I am marble. I do not break.”Stark pinched the bridge of his nose, sighing audibly. "Jesus Christ."Or: Melinda May is tasked with "secondary re-conditioning" of the infamous Black Widow—a small girl who can't possibly be more than 11 years old. It's slow going.
Relationships: Clint Barton & Melinda May, James "Bucky" Barnes & Natasha Romanov, Melinda May & Natasha Romanov, Melinda May & Natasha Romanov & Tony Stark, Melinda May & Tony Stark, Natasha Romanov & Tony Stark, Phil Coulson & Melinda May, Steve Rogers & Tony Stark
Series: the art of becoming [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1799719
Comments: 38
Kudos: 207





	1. wheels up

**Author's Note:**

> guess who's trying a new thing: actually finishing the whole work before posting it
> 
> (hint: it's me)
> 
> this is crazy i cant believe people actually DO this 
> 
> i feel so organized

To be perfectly honest, Melinda still wasn’t 100% clear on how… _this_ happened. 

One week she was deep undercover in the eastern Russian city of Khabarosk, infiltrating a well-staffed underground base co-funded by both HYDRA and Leviathan (Soviet deep science and espionage) in near equal parts. The next, S.H.I.E.L.D. had her blowing her cover and extracting the day before a massive full-frontal assault on the HYDRA-Leviathan base, whereupon which hundreds of high-level officers and astro-nuclear physicists were taken into the custody of both S.H.I.E.L.D. and the United Nations awaiting further evaluation. 

What had been pitched to her as a likely nine-month-long mission became five overnight.

Which wasn’t exactly gut-wrenching in any sense, because she hated being undercover. She’d made no qualms about that to Coulson and Hill and even Director Fury himself, the possibility of subsequent disciplinary measures as a direct result be damned.

Either way, though, she’d only been back in the States for nine days and back on base for two when she received a summons to Director Fury’s office—the very next morning, 9:00am sharp. 

It wasn’t entirely out of left field in any sense, though the fact still remained that the request itself was slightly unusual (especially considering she’d met with the Director for a comprehensive op debrief not 36 hours earlier). Still, she treated that day as any other: 

Up and dressed by 5:00; Tai Chi until 6:00; training and weights until 7:00; shower, breakfast (and coffee), then report for the daily morning briefing at 7:30. 

The briefing ended early that morning (something of a rarity), around 8:40. 

She lingered for a brief spell around the holotable, exchanging small talk with one or two other agents, then excused herself to venture in search of (first and foremost) an additional cup of coffee and (still important but slightly less so) a quick check-in with Fitz and Simmons down in the lab. 

She waited until a few minutes before 9:00 to board the elevator, guzzled down a good portion of her coffee on the long ride up, and arrived at Fury’s office with exactly a minute to spare. 

She’d only just risen her fist to knock when—

“Come in,” Fury’s low, no-nonsense tone filtered through the sturdy titanium-alloyed door. 

She did. 

The Director sat squarely at his polished mahogany desk, a grouchy look upon his solemn features. His single uncovered eye followed her intently as she entered. 

Hill stood just a step behind him and another to the left, brown hair fastened in her trademark bun, lean arms crossed tightly across her chest. 

Coulson was leant casually up against the wall to Melinda’s left, wearing a well-pressed suit (typical) and a decidedly grim expression (significantly less typical). 

There were two office chairs sitting opposite Director Fury’s desk, the one on the left vacant while the other… 

Huh. 

In the other sat a small, thin redheaded girl. Melinda couldn’t see much of her, just the very top of head, but she twitched almost imperceptibly with every step Melinda took, like she could sense her every movement. 

That alone implied training—long-term and intensive. 

“Agent May,” Fury announced, successfully drawing Melinda’s attentions (… most of them, at least). “Long time no see.”

“Not nearly long enough, Director,” Melinda deadpanned. 

Phil’s lips twitched at that. Maria raised an eyebrow. 

Fury, meanwhile, didn’t blink.

“Would you like to sit?” he questioned, then. The impatient frown on his less-than-jovial expression told her he really didn’t care either way. 

“I’d prefer to stand, if it’s all the same to you, Sir.”

He gave no indication that he heard her, just turned his one-eyed gaze upon Phil. “Coulson?”

“May, meet Natalia Romanova,” Phil said, gesturing vaguely towards the tiny redheaded girl sitting stiffly in the chair to her right. “Codename: Black Widow."

Melinda felt her posture stiffen, every sore muscle in her body suddenly pulled taut like a bowstring. 

“Natalia, meet Agent Melinda May,” Phil continued on, as if undeterred, “your new handler.”

— — 

“Sir, all due respect—but, have you lost your mind?” she demanded as soon as they were secure, standing on the business end of double-sided bulletproof glass looking in on a blank-faced redheaded killer who couldn’t have been more than 11. She sat cross-legged on the floor of an interrogation-room-slash-containment-cell specially designed for enhanced individuals, her back straight, every muscle in her little body held perfectly still. Impressive. 

Fury didn’t even spare her a glance, his low-browed gaze staring down the girl through the reinforced glass. “I suppose that depends on who you ask, Agent May.”

“She’s _dangerous_ , Sir.”

Fury’s lips twitched. “Yes, she is.”

“If she really wanted to escape, she would have,” Phil piped up ever-so-helpfully from beside her.

Melinda pointedly resisted the urge to scoff. “Best way to take us down, especially while we’re still working to rebuild what HYDRA nearly demolished just last year? Establish an inside man. We all know that.”

“Agreed,” Fury replied.

Phil nodded along. 

“Then _why_ is she _here?_ "

Fury shrugged. “Risk and reward.”

“This is one hell of a risk,” Melinda shot back, frustration rising steadily in her gut even as the words preemptively implied her looming (inevitable) resignation. 

(She knew a losing battle when she saw one. 

She knew that no matter what she said, no matter how impenetrable her defense, this was not something she could change. 

The decision had been made.)

“Which can make for one hell of a reward.”

Melinda sighed, jaw clenched. “When do I start?”

“Right now.”

“No briefing?”

“This _is_ the briefing, Agent May. The rest of the files will be sent electronically over an encrypted line once you and the girl have settled. Understood?”

_‘Settled’?_

“Understood, Sir."

— — 

56 minutes. 

Melinda had been sitting in the interrogation-room-slash-containment-cell across from Natalia Romanova, mimicking the young girl’s cross-legged position upon the polished cement flooring, for 56 minutes. 

The girl had yet to utter a word. 

To be perfectly fair, Melinda hadn’t said anything beyond, “Hi, my name is Melinda May. We met earlier.”

Still, it’d have been nice to see some reciprocity. (Not that she’d let her frustrations show, of course.)

_“The bus arrives in two hours, Agent May,” Fury had said. “Until then, you sit with her. Talk to her, don’t talk to her; I don’t care. But when that bus leaves, I want you both on it. That’s an order.”_

She counted the seconds in her head. 

_55… 56…. 57… 58… 59…_

57 minutes.

Only 63 more to go. 

— — 

A knock on the glass at exactly the 120-minute mark signaled the bus’ arrival. 

“Time to go,” Melinda informed the girl, rising swiftly to her feet even as her stiff muscles screamed in protest. 

As if on command, the girl rose to her feet (which were bare, her toes bruised purple and caked with dried blood), cuffed hands resting placidly at her waist.

She wore little—a standard black T-shirt emblazoned with the S.H.I.E.L.D. logo in grey on the left breast, and unisex sporting shorts with a smaller S.H.I.E.L.D. insignia stamped above the left hemline to match. No drawstring, Melinda noted. 

The fortified vibranium-alloyed door opened with a hiss as they neared it, and Melinda gestured wordlessly for the girl to take the lead. 

(Turning her back to the girl for even a moment was a mistake that could all too easily prove fatal.

It didn’t matter that she was cuffed, or that she looked like she was 11, or that she hadn’t yet made a single move to suggest any ill intent. 

Restrained or not, child or not, she was the Black Widow, and her deadly reputation far preceded her.)

“Through this door and the next, then left down the hallway,” she directed.

The girl complied without hesitation, taking silent steps past an eight-man security detail (each operative Level 7 and above) through to the hall, where she turned left as per Melinda’s instruction.

“Take the second right. It leads directly out into the hangar."

A four-man detail (each operative decked out in tactical gear and armed to the proverbial teeth) met them at the first right, falling into a box formation around the girl and Melinda—two in the lead, two heading up the rear. 

As promised, the bus was waiting for them when they arrived—a relatively small bird equipped with all the newest features: state-of-the-art cloaking, non-lethal dendrotoxin-equipped guns (along with regular lethal lead-equipped ones), self-regenerating contingencies (in case of an EMP or any related technological deficiencies)… etc.

Melinda strapped into the cockpit—pilot’s seat, left side. 

After some deliberation, she ordered Romanova to sit alongside her—co-pilot’s seat, right side. 

Despite her reservations, she wasn’t delusional. If the girl had wanted to kill her, she’d already be dead. 

Sighing quietly to herself, she set to work gearing up the engines, then securing a microphone-equipped headset around her head. She gestured for Romanova to do the same.

“This is S.H.I.E.L.D. 626, requesting permission for take off. Do you read me?”

Crackling in her ear, followed by a low static-y hum. 

“We read you loud and clear, S.H.I.E.L.D. 626,” came a man’s voice over the channel. "You are cleared for take off. Over and out."

Two months’ leave (give or take a couple weeks). That’s how long Fury had ordered her to reside with the girl in a S.H.I.E.L.D. safe house (location: classified) for “secondary re-conditioning,” as he’d called it. 

She’d be piloting only so far as the border; from there, she was to take the girl down to the loading bay, where they were to remain until their arrival. 

Over and out, indeed.

— —


	2. debrief

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Arriving at the safe house.

The details of the girl’s file were scant, to say the very least.

_Name: Natalia Alianovna Romanova_

_Known Associations: KGB, Soviet Armed Forces, Leviathan, HYDRA, Red Room (?)_

_Known Aliases: Inez d’Évreux, Aubree Butler, Maja Thorisdóttir, Nadya Rabinovich, Ava Nelson, Ksenia Maksimova, Natalie Rushman, Izabela Wiśniewski_

_Codename: Black Widow_

_Known Affiliates: Yelena Belova, Alexei Shostakov, Ivan Petrovich_

_Hair Color: Red_

_Eye Color: Green_

_Height: 1.499 meters_

_Nationality: Russian_

_Race: Caucasian_

_Sex: Female_

_Birthdate: Unknown_

_Birthplace: Unknown_

_Age: Unknown_

_Marital Status: Unknown_

_Familial Relations: N/A_

_Threat Assessment: Deadly_

Melinda read it as they settled across from one another strapped to either sides of the cargo bay, and if she felt Natalia Romanova take curious peeks over at the file in her hands in the meantime, she didn't let on. 

The ride was far from smooth as the plane veered into a series of nausea-inducing twists and turns every now and then (likely to confuse its occupants and further conceal their final destination). Melinda winced when one particularly sharp change in direction had her shifting heavily to the left such that the belt buckle at her waist dug painfully into her abdomen, even as the girl across from her remained the perfect picture of stony-faced composure in her seat. Entirely unflappable. 

It took nine hours for them to arrive, and a couple tens of minutes in change. 

The moment they touched down, Melinda was on the move. She had her orders: ice the girl, lower the cargo bay doors, transfer her down into the underground levels (those aboveground would remain tightly sealed) of the S.H.I.E.L.D.-approved safehouse—their base of operations for the foreseeable future. 

The girl didn’t flinch when Melinda rose with a glowing-neon-blue pistol (FitzSimmons’ beloved ‘Icer'), its specially-designed mag loaded with fast-acting non-lethal dendrotoxin rounds, nor did she so much as tense when Melinda aimed at her shoulder and fired. 

She was out in a matter of three-and-a-half minutes (Melinda counted each second in her head)—though even that was decidedly unusual. 

Typically, a standardized dendrotoxin bullet rendered the target unconscious in a matter of seconds; of course, it was necessary to take into account weight, gender, height, etc., as such determinants may work to slow or quicken the chemical reaction beneath the flesh. 

Still, those components (weight, gender, height, age) only ever skewed the margins of efficacy by a handful of seconds at most, not to mention that each contributing factor in this particular case (a small young girl with a willowy-thin frame who couldn’t possibly be any older than 11) would only precipitate a heightened potency of the dendrotoxin drug in her system, rather than the other way around. 

Unless, of course… she was enhanced. 

Resisting the urge to heave a sigh, Melinda tucked that rationale away in the very recesses of her mind, to be examined in detail at a later time. 

Night had long since fallen where they’d touched down, the cool breeze ripe with a humidity that Melinda could taste like sweetened sugar on her tongue.

She iced the girl once more for good measure, then hoisted her up in a fireman’s carry over her left shoulder. As suspected, the girl was far from heavy—70 or 80 pounds, if she were forced to wager a guess.

For the first time since meeting her (and note that she used the word “meeting” in only the loosest sense), Melinda couldn’t help but feel a twinge of sympathy for the tiny 70-pound girl resting limply over her shoulder, for the _child_ she could have been… the child that she _should_ have been. 

The moment was fleeting, however, and Melinda was quick to omit it in favor of taking in their surroundings—in particular, the S.H.I.E.L.D.-issued safe house that awaited their arrival. 

It wasn’t all that hard to spot:

A reinforced (likely vibranium-alloyed) silver-grey door up ahead fashioned with a round, metallic banker’s wheel had broken ground amongst a dense grassy-green landscape filled with swaying palm trees and plantlife all around. It looked very much like the stereotypical entrance to an underground bunker with a polished silver keypad and a sense of solitude a mile wide. 

There were no aboveground levels to be seen (contrary to the pithy briefing Fury had sent electronically an hour earlier over a well-encrypted line), though Melinda knew well enough by now that that did not at all mean they weren’t there. In all likelihood, the aboveground portion of the structure had simply been cloaked to ensure they remained as isolated and secluded as possible (the result of a combined effort between FitzSimmons and one Tony Stark).

She punched in the 12-digit code she’d memorized on the ride over (which she mentally discarded after doing so, as it would change on a daily basis), then acceded to the secondary requests for both a retinal scan and voice-activated keyword as needed. Following that, it took a not insignificant amount of strength to twist the five-pronged banker’s wheel—once, twice, three times around. 

The door opened with a hiss, then (no further manpower on Melinda’s effort required). It swung to reveal the top stone steps of a narrow spiraled staircase that led directly down a good three stories into the earth and out into a spacious atrium. 

(About three steps into her descent, she’d heard a series of hisses and beeps as the bunker door sealed itself behind her, followed by a cool feminine-sounding voice with a curious European inflection that Melinda thought she just might recognize from somewhere announcing, “Underground sector secure.”)

She hadn’t gone more than a step across the polished atrium flooring when the level voice made itself known once again:

“Welcome, guests Melinda May and Natalia Romanova. Boss will be up to greet you shortly.”

_‘Boss’?_

Neither Fury’s concisely-worded report nor their curt discussions from earlier had included any mention of a ‘boss,’ much less any additional personnel complicit in Black Widow’s “secondary re-conditioning” beyond herself.

A half a second later, she got her answer in the form of none other than Tony Stark jogging his way over from a long unmarked hallway directly to Melinda’s right. 

Rather suddenly, it all made sense, even as Melinda felt herself stiffen. 

The cool voice with the European inflection—F.R.I.D.A.Y., Tony Stark’s AI (after J.A.R.V.I.S.) that spoke like a curiously soft-mannered Irish native. 

“Agent May!” greeted a slightly-out-of-breath Tony Stark as he came to a halt just feet away from where she stood. He wore ratty blue jeans, a long-sleeved black V-neck tee (over which the downwards-facing triangular arc reactor secured itself, blinking brightly back up at her) and a harried expression upon his lined features. “I don’t believe we’ve met. I’m—"

Melinda raised a single brow. 

“Yeah, that’s fair, you definitely already know who I am,” Tony conceded, eyes alight with something like excitement as they shifted over to observe the thin figure slung over Melinda’s shoulder. “And that’s her?”

Melinda offered him a curt nod. 

“Awesome. Let’s get her to her quarters, shall we?”

_‘Quarters’?_

— — 

“So, this whole level is available to the both of you, though most of its non-essential features will be sealed off to our residential sociopathic Itsy-Bitsy-Spider: the weapons armory, the lab, stuff like that,” Stark explained, gesturing vaguely with his hands as he led them through a series of interconnected corridors on the level in question. 

"You, however, will have full access—most secure areas will require a retinal scan and voice-activated key word that changes twice a day, which F.R.I.D.A.Y. will send electronically to your handheld tablet so that you and only you will have access to it. Here,” he paused outside a door-shaped entry way (though it was curiously devoid of a door), patting its level stone frame with an open palm and flashing Melinda a small crooked grin, “is for the kid.” 

He hesitated then, frowning slightly. “Should I be calling her a kid? It feels weird to be calling her a kid.”

Melinda felt it again, a little stronger than before: that twinge of sympathy low in her gut. “She _is_ a kid, Mr. Stark.”

“Tony,” he corrected instantly. 

“… Tony,” she repeated. It felt strange coming off her tongue.

His lips twitched. “You’re not much of a talker, are you?”

She blinked. 

“I’m pretty sure that those are the first words you’ve said since you got here. Right, F.R.I.D.A.Y.?”

“That’s correct, Boss.”

Melinda fought the urge to roll her eyes; instead, she settled for jutting her chin towards the doorless entry way and questioned, “No door?”

“Well, your quarters have a door, of course—blast-resistant, vibranium-alloyed, the works,” Stark blathered on, leaning himself up against the entry way. “But for the kid… well. Fury said to give her a door when she earns it.” Stark’s expression twisted at that. "System of rewards, and all that. Said it’d be good for her.”

That caught Melinda’s attention. “You don’t agree?”

“It feels… wrong,” he admitted, a thoughtful look in his eye as his hand came up to rub at the neatly-trimmed beard along the line of his jaw.

“What does?”

“This ‘reward system,’” he huffed, making air quotes with either hand. “She’s not a dog.”

“She’s not exactly harmless, either,” Melinda pointed out, though there was a part of her that couldn’t help wanting to agree with Tony (—a part of her that already did, no matter how vehemently she worked to smother it).

Stark’s eyes flared with something like righteous ire. “So you agree with Fury, then?”

“I didn’t say that.”

The steely glint in Stark’s gaze eased (somewhat), the lopsided grin returning to his clean-cut features. “I like you, Agent May."

She was saved from having to administer a response when she felt the girl’s arm twitch against her left shoulder blade—a sure sign that she was regaining consciousness. 

“Hold that thought,” she told him, then turned sharply on her heel towards the empty training room they’d passed a handful of minutes earlier, the girl in tow. 

“Where are you going?” Stark called after her. 

“Debrief in the training room,” she called back, then stopped in her tracks to turn and flash him a calculating look. “You’re welcome to join, Mr. Stark.”

He shrugged, then jogged over. “It’s Tony.”

She didn’t justify that with a response, just turned and kept walking, Stark following closely on her heels. 

— — 

They sat atop a floor comprised of well-cushioned matte-black mats in the vacant training room: the girl cross-legged with her cuffed hands resting in her lap and her back to a wall of floor-to-ceiling mirrors, Stark and Melinda side-by-side just across from her. 

Melinda fought the urge to roll her eyes as Stark eyed his own reflection critically, hands fiddling with his close-cropped hair. 

“Do you know why you’re here?” Melinda asked a minute later, when it’d become abundantly clear that neither Stark (the man still very much preoccupied with re-styling his hair in the mirror) nor the girl (whose expression remained unfailingly blank as ever) were going to start the conversation for her. 

“It is a test, no?” the girl replied simply, her American accent very near perfect save for the faintest tinge of Slavic influence—the kind that would be imperceptible to most people.

(Melinda was not ‘most people.’)

She fought to keep the surprise she felt from showing upon her features. Instead, she opted to focus on the girl’s strange query. “A test? What makes you say that?”

The girl tilted her head, assessing Melinda with a level gaze. “You tell me.”

“There's no test, Ms. Romanova.” 

(It felt strange calling her that, this small girl with wide green eyes and thin pale limbs and a painfully youthful look about her. 

She didn’t really know what the alternative, might be, as ’Natalia’ felt too familiar… a privilege she hadn’t yet earned. 

‘Ms. Romanova’ it was, then.)

“I don’t believe you.”

“Why would we test you, kid?” Stark jumped in, then. Evidently, he’d sorted out the hair situation. 

Something like surprise flitted briefly across the girl’s expression, though she did well to cover it. “Why are _you_ here?”

“Oh, right, I suppose we haven’t done the whole ‘introductions’ thing yet. I’m Tony S—"

“I know who you are, Mr. Stark,” the girl interjected flatly. 

“Jesus _Christ_ , is _anyone_ gonna let me introduce myself today?” Stark grumbled indignantly, shaking his head. “Son of a—"

“Stark,” Melinda snapped. 

“Tony,” he corrected, shooting her a vaguely disgruntled look that she fastidiously ignored. “Why won’t you call me ’Tony’?”

Melinda fought the urge to sigh. “Can we talk about this later?"

“Why?” he fired back. “It’s not like Anastasia over here is talking to us anyways.”

“Fine. Can we discuss this later, _Tony_?”

“Nope,” he negated, wagging a finger at her. (She pointedly resisted the urge to break it.) “That doesn’t count.”

Melinda shot him a withering glare. “I called you 'Tony.’”

“Yeah, _duh_ , but not because you _wanted_ to,” Stark argued back, seeming to have entirely forgotten the very lethal and formidable girl in their immediate presence. (It was almost impressive… _almost_.) "You just did it so we wouldn’t have to talk about it.”

“Here’s an idea—let’s get back to debriefing the girl, hm?”

Stark rolled his eyes, gesturing vaguely over to the girl in question. “‘Debrief’? What is she, like, 7? What could we _possibly_ —"

“I’m older than that,” the girl spoke up then, lips pinched with a mixture of amusement and annoyance. 

They both turned to look at her. 

“How old are you?” Melinda questioned after a brief moment of (blessed) quiet. 

The girl frowned slightly. “Why do you want to know?”

Melinda opened her mouth to reply, but Stark beat her to it: “So that I can find out if we’re actually gonna need the frozen breast milk in the fridge. It’s taking up too much room, and having only one flavor of ice cream in the freezer is just boring.”

The girl blinked owlishly in response to that. Melinda valiantly fought against the urge to smack herself in the forehead. 

“That was a joke,” Stark clarified after a long pause of tense quiet. “I was joking.”

No one laughed.

“Jeez,” Stark grumbled. “Tough crowd."

The girl’s brow furrowed. “Where is Ivan?”

“Who?”

“Ivan Petrovich?” Melinda asked, looking to the girl for clarification. 

“Yes.” She nodded sharply. “Where is he? Am I permitted to speak with him?”

Melinda shrugged, consciously making the decision to put her cards (some of them, at least) on the table. “I don’t know where Ivan is, Ms. Romanova.”

“But you know his name.”

Melinda nodded. “It was in your file.”

“The one you were reading on the plane,” the girl ventured, gaze narrowed. 

“Yes.”

“You are S.H.I.E.L.D.”

It wasn’t a question, but Melinda answered it anyhow. “Yes.”

Her apt gaze shifted to Stark. “And you?”

“It varies,” Stark replied without a moment’s hesitation, waving his hand dismissively through the air.

The girl’s raised her brow at that. “You are loyal to no one?”

“I’m loyal to myself,” Stark corrected, undeterred. 

“And yet, you are here.” The girl’s gaze darted back to Melinda. “With her.”

“Brilliant deduction, Little Red,” Stark lauded, a note of sarcasm leaking into his tone. “Indeed, I am."

“Why?”

“To make sure S.H.I.E.L.D. does this right.”

“What does that mean?”

Melinda felt her interest pique alongside the girl’s at this particular line of questioning, though she did her damndest not to show it. 

“It _means_ , your old handlers messed with your head—your memories.” 

The girl stiffened where she sat, cueing Melinda in to the veracity of Tony’s claim. _How did he know that?_ she wondered, but kept quiet. 

The girl, however, had no such reservations. “How do you know that?” she demanded, green eyes flaring with anger.

“They made you kill your friends,” Stark continued on, ignoring her question entirely, “the people you _loved_ —"

“Love is for children."

Stark made a face. “You do realize that you are, quite literally, an actual child?”

“I am not a child,” she protested monotonously, though Melinda could hear the frustration simmering beneath her lackluster tone. "I am a Widow.”

“If it walks like a duck and quacks like duck, it’s a freaking duck,” Stark shot back impatiently.

“I am a Widow,” the girl defended, easily contesting Stark's vigor. “I am marble. I do not break.”

Stark pinched the bridge of his nose, sighing audibly. “You’re not marble, kid. You’re flesh and bone— _human_."

The girl went quiet for a long moment, then. Melinda could practically _see_ the gears in her head turning. 

“You do not work for Ivan,” she said eventually, her words careful and precise. 

Stark groaned. “Didn’t we, like, just go over this?”

“No, we don’t,” Melinda answered for the both of them, tamping down on the hundreds of questions threatening to overwhelm her at the curious exchange she’d just witnessed between Stark and the girl. “I told you: I work for S.H.I.E.L.D.”

“And you trust them?” she asked, the barest note of disbelief evident in her otherwise bland tone. 

“Not in the slightest.” She would be a fool if she did. 

At that, Stark turned to stare at her. She ignored him. 

“But you answer to them?”

“Most of the time, yes."

The girl nodded, like she understood. (Melinda thought she just might.) 

“Why am I here?” she asked after a brief spell of quiet, a glimmer of genuine curiosity in her gaze betraying the terse and almost business-like quality to her tone. 

Melinda shrugged. “Why do _you_ think you’re here?"

“A test, perhaps,” she guessed, sounding resigned. “Maybe I am meant to kill you, or you are meant to kill me.”

“So why haven’t you done it?”

The girl tilted her head, a silent question in her shrewd green-eyed gaze. 

“Why haven’t you killed me?” Melinda clarified. "Or Stark?” 

“Tony,” Stark mumbled. 

They both ignored him. 

“I have not been ordered to kill you,” the girl said simply. "Or him.”

“Generous."

“What _have_ you been ordered to do?”

“I don’t understand,” the girl replied, her brow furrowed. “ _You_ are my handler."

“According to S.H.I.E.L.D., but you don’t answer to them.”

“Correct.” The girl blinked. “I answer to you.”

Melinda head spun. “I thought you answered to Ivan.”

“He is not here,” she countered simply, like it was obvious. “You are.”

Melinda blinked. This didn’t make any sense. “Would you answer to Ivan if he were here right now?”

“I… " the girl hesitated, looking troubled for a moment (though it disappeared just as quickly as it’d come). “I don’t know."

“Hey, kid?” Stark questioned; the girl reluctantly shifted her gaze from Melinda to focus on him. “What do you remember before Agent May came to get you?”

The girl hesitated. 

“Answer him,” Melinda told her on something of a whim, curious to see how the girl would respond. 

Almost instantly, she complied. (Melinda felt a sickening knot tighten in her gut.) “It is… fuzzy,” she murmured, distance bleeding into her gaze. "There was a doctor. I bled from the temples of my skull. I saw your handler—the man with one eye.”

“He’s not my handler,” Melinda disputed, not bothering to suppress the bitterness in her tone. 

“I do not know how long I slept, afterward,” the girl continued on, giving no outward indication that she’d heard Melinda speak. “I was taken to an office, then a room.”

“And then I walked in,” Melinda supplied numbly. 

The girl nodded. “Yes. My handler.” 

“Yeah, but how did you _know_ she was your handler?” Stark cut in, skepticism mounting in his tone.

(It only further solidified her suspicions that the two of them were arriving rapidly upon the same conclusion: Fury had messed with her head. 

Wiped her, edited her fragmented memories, instilled within her an unwavering loyalty that bound her unconditionally to Melinda… and, by extension, to S.H.I.E.L.D.

Son of a _bitch_.)

It took Melinda a moment to realize that the girl had angled her chin expectantly towards her, awaiting her judgement. 

It made her sick to her stomach, but she looked the girl in the eye and gave her a nod, silently permitting her to answer Stark’s question.

“I am not sure,” the girl admitted. “I just knew.”

“I wondered why he'd let her come here,” Stark mumbled, an uncharacteristic venom lacing his tone. "Son of a _bitch_." 

Melinda clenched her jaw tightly, focusing on regulating her breathing. (It was markedly more difficult than it typically was.)

Son of a bitch, indeed. 

— — 

Sleep was elusive that night. (Melinda wouldn’t have been so foolish as to expect anything less.)

She couldn’t stop thinking about the girl, about Tony Stark… about _Fury_. 

_“ You are my handler.”_ The girl’s words echoed throughout her brain on an endless loop. _"I answer to you.”_

What had Fury done to her? And why did he program her such that she answered to Melinda, of all people? Why not Hill? Why not himself?

Too many questions, and not enough answers. 

One thing was for sure, though: 

Fury was going to get an earful when she spoke with him again. 

— —

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this chapter was mad fun to write lskdjfl i love tony


	3. natasha

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Eventually, she spoke: “Natasha.”
> 
> “What’s that?”
> 
> “Natasha,” she repeated. “That’s what you can call me.”
> 
> Melinda bit back a smile. “Natasha it is.”

“How do you take your eggs?” Melinda asked as a blank-faced and bare-footed Natalia Romanova cautiously approached, intelligent green eyes cataloguing her every move with wary interest. 

No response. 

Melinda fought the urge to heave a sigh. For the moment, she directed her attentions instead towards spraying the frying pan with a light coating of cooking oil, then setting the burner to medium heat. 

“Take a seat, Ms. Romanova.” She nodded her head towards the dining table. 

Silently, the girl complied—pulling out a chair and seating herself without complaint. 

“Now—eggs?” she questioned, rummaging through the various wooden cabinets and drawers within the kitchen space until she managed to get ahold of a spatula. “Scrambled, over-easy, sunny-side up?”

The girl didn’t blink. “Whatever you're having is good.”

“… Right.”

— — 

Breakfast was a large bowl chock-full of scrambled eggs, one plate of sliced Portuguese sausage, and another filled with bacon. 

As adamant as she’d resolved to be about giving the girl some measure of freedom (to a certain extent, of course), she figured that in the interest of time, it’d benefit them both for her to divvy up the portions herself rather than watch Romanova have a one-sided staring contest with the food as it turned cold.

The fridge was well-stocked with vegetables, fruits, various beverages ranging from Swedish beer to cranberry juice. When Melinda asked what Romanova would like to drink, the girl's input was (predictably) minimal (or perhaps ‘nonexistent' would be a better word). She settled for dropping a cube of ice into two glasses and filling them both with water. 

The girl’s eyes widened incrementally when Melinda placed a silver fork and butter knife beside her plate before moving to sit adjacent to her at the head of the table, easily within maiming (read: killing) range—but a half a second passed and it was gone, just as quickly as it’d come. 

“Eat,” Melinda told her, nodding toward the girl's plate. “Don’t do it because I’m ordering you to; do it because you should. Your body needs the fuel.”

The girl hesitated for a second, then picked up the fork. 

Melinda forced herself to focus on spearing a slice of sausage and chewing it down as the girl began prodding timidly at her eggs. As far as she was concerned, this was progress (or as close to it as they would be getting at the moment), and she was loathe to squander it. 

They ate in silence for the next ten minutes or so, but Melinda didn’t mind. 

It wasn’t exactly comfortable, but the tension was markedly less than the day before, and that was something. 

She waited until the girl’s plate was empty save for a couple forkfuls of scrambled egg and a single slice of well-cooked sausage before attempting a conversation. 

“How’d you sleep?” she asked, wincing internally at the throaty sound of her own voice. 

The girl shrugged in lieu of response. 

Melinda watched her stab the final sausage upon the near-empty plate and pop it daintily into her mouth. “I’m not going to order you to answer me, but I’d like it if you did.”

The girl slowly chewed her mouthful of sausage with a vaguely thoughtful expression, then swallowed it down. “The bed was comfortable, Agent May.” Melinda fought the urge to cringe at the formal denomination. "It’s a nice room.”

Melinda afforded her a shallow nod. “I’m glad.” She sipped noncommittally at her water, gathering her thoughts. “Now, about me being your handler… "

“Is there a mission?” The girl’s jade-green eyes surged with a renewed sense of alertness. 

“No, there’s no mission,” Melinda assured her. “I wanted to… set some baselines.”

The vigilance in her gaze abated somewhat. “Baselines,” the girl repeated, a shade of bewilderment creeping into her less-than-enthused tone. 

“Yes. First and foremost: how we should address one another from here on out.”

The girl blinked. “You can call me whatever you like.”

_Of course she’d say that_. “Do you have a preference?”

The girl blinked again, as if taken aback by the question. “A preference?”

“For example, ‘Agent May’ is a little too formal for my tastes.”

The girl tilted her head. “What would you like me to call you?”

Melinda thought for a moment. “Let’s go with ‘May,’ for now. That work for you?"

The girl again looked somewhat confounded (though she did well to hide it, as expected) at being asked to offer up her opinion (… at the prospect of her opinion _mattering_ , period). 

“Understood… May.”

“Good.” May gave her a sharp nod. “Now, you.”

“Me?”

“Yes, you. What would you like for me to call you?”

The girl hesitated, shrewd green eyes flashing briefly with something like fear. “Is this a test?"

_God dammit_. “No, this is not a test.”

The girl didn’t hesitate. “Would you tell me if it were?"

“Yes.” 

“You’re telling the truth,” the girl said, a hint of bewilderment coloring her tone.

“I don’t plan on lying to you.”

“Why? You don’t owe me the truth.”

Melinda downed the rest of her water, eyeing the girl thoughtfully. “You don’t owe me your compliance."

“And yet you have it."

“Not by choice,” Melinda countered. 

The girl’s lips twitched. “Does that matter?”

“It does to me.”

The girl was silent for a long moment. 

Eventually, she spoke: “Natasha.”

“What’s that?”

“Natasha,” she repeated. “That’s what you can call me.”

Melinda bit back a smile. “Natasha it is.”

— — 

“Did you know?” Melinda demanded as soon as she had Phil on the line, staring down his figure displayed upon the communications screen with a cold stare.

The man’s pleasant expression didn’t falter. “Well, hello to you, too, Melinda. And I’m well, thanks for asking.”

“Answer me, Phil. _Now_."

Phil’s kind expression sobered quickly at the urgency in her tone, his brows creasing with telltale concern. “What’s wrong? Did something happen?”

“Natasha.”

Phil frowned, squinting at the camera. “Who?”

“The girl.”

His greenish eyes swiftly scanned her for any sign of injury, the crease in his brow deepening. “Did she hurt you? Where is she? Do you need—"

“No, Phil, she didn’t hurt me. And she’s training right now.” She didn’t add _‘but it wouldn’t surprise me if she were listening in right now on this call,’_ even as she knew the probability was exceedingly high. 

For this to work, they needed trust. Transparency. (To a degree.) 

They needed to build something together to repair that which a long list of corrupt (no matter how well-meaning) individuals had broken. Fury’s misconduct toward her was only the most recent in a vast index of systematic abuses and violations—of that, Melinda had no doubt. 

Sure, she’d have much more preferred the girl— _Natasha_ —to approach her and _ask_ if she might sit in on the call while Melinda spoke with Phil rather than eavesdropping, Natasha didn’t owe her that. 

Building a bridge between the pair of them would mean conceding ground—a fair amount of it—on Melinda’s part, but she stubbornly refused to let that deter her. 

At the end of it all—the senseless killing, the games they played with her head, the propensity for gross inhumanity they fought so hard to instill beneath her very skin—Natasha was nothing more than a terrified and perceptive young girl with the sort of rotten-to-the-core luck that managed to land her time and time again beneath the thumbs of people that were supposed to know better… people that damn well _should’ve_ known better. 

Natasha wouldn’t demand it of her (far from it, in fact), wouldn’t _dare_ expect anything from Melinda beyond the merciless exploitation she’d known since the very start.

And in spite of that (or perhaps because of it), Melinda had to be the one that gave it to her. 

She had to be the one that _knew better_.

(After all, it wasn’t like there was anyone else she saw itching to step up to the plate.)

“… Melinda?” Phil’s gentle voice pulled her from her thoughts, his forehead still creased with evident concern. "You still with me?”

“Sorry,” she apologized. “I was just thinking.”

“Care to share with the class?”

“Not yet.”

Phil hummed, not looking the least bit surprised. “Take your time. Now, about the girl… "

“How long has she been in S.H.I.E.L.D.’s custody?”

Phil pursed his lips, gaze turning thoughtful. “I don’t know.”

“Fury didn’t tell you?”

He shrugged. “The first time I heard him mention her was about a month ago.”

“After she’d gone dark for six months.”

Phil nodded, humming in agreement—a second later, his expression turned stormy, gentle eyes flashing with recognition. “Wait… You think Fury had her all that time?”

“He did something to her, Phil.”

He paused. “What does _that_ mean?"

“It means she’s been… _programmed_ ” (she hated that term, like Natasha was a computer rather than a person, but she was struggling to come up with a suitable alternative) “to follow my orders."

His figure went eerily still, such that she almost thought the screen had frozen— _almost_. “… Are you sure that’s not just what she _wants_ you to think?”

“As sure as I can be.” She sighed. “Phil, she’s had multiple opportunities to kill me, and she hasn’t exploited a single one.”

“That doesn’t mean she won’t,” he pointed out. 

“I know. She’s adept at hiding her emotions, and more than proficient enough to fool even well-trained people like us into thinking her harmless when she’s anything but.”

“But… "

“You know me so well,” she lauded, feeling the the ghost of a smile pull at her lips. “ _But_ —I don’t think she’s lying. Not about this.”

He let out a long, slow breath. “If you’re wrong… "

“I know.”

He was quiet for a moment before his features were hardening, a mask of steely determination sliding into place. “What do you need me to do?”

“I want to know _how_ Fury did it—how he managed to screw with her memories, let alone her allegiances… ”

He nodded.

“… and then, I want to know if it’s reversible.”

He frowned. “Melinda—"

“She deserves a will of her own, Phil. One that isn’t dictated by what others want from her—not her old handlers, not Fury, and _certainly_ not me.”

Silence. 

“Okay, let’s say we find out a way to reverse-engineer what Fury did to her, to give her that agency back,” Phil said eventually, trepidation evident in his tone. "What happens after that?”

“Well, I suppose that it’d be up to her, wouldn’t it?”

“She’s dangerous, Melinda,” Phil insisted. "What if we set her loose and she hurts someone?”

“Then it’s on me,” she concluded simply, her tone brokering no room for argument. “Then it’s my job to get her back, or die trying.”

“That’s…. " he trailed off. 

“Stupid?” Melinda supplied, lips quirking with droll amusement. 

A fond grin made its way onto his lined features. “I was going to say ‘exceedingly kindhearted,’” she fought the urge to roll her eyes "—but stupid works, too.”

Melinda rolled her eyes, waving the comment away with a dismissive gesture (though she allowed the fond smile curving her lips to remain). “Don’t boost my ego just yet. It’s all hypothetical right now.”

“Then I suppose I have my work cut out for me,” Phil acquiesced easily, eyes twinkling. 

“Be careful, Phil.”

He nodded decisively. “You, too, Melinda.”

— — 

She stopped by the very base-floor lab to see Stark after checking briefly in on Natasha (who was launching knives at a wooden target in Training Room A). A brief conversation with F.R.I.D.A.Y. told her she’d find him down in the lab. 

He was deeply immersed in his work when she stepped off the elevator. 

If he registered her presence, he didn’t let on. Rather, he seemed to lean even further over the silver-plated contraption he was tinkering with on one of many steel worktables scattered across the lab, muttering unintelligibly to himself all the while. 

“Stark,” she called gently as she approached. 

The man jolted at the sound of her voice, his wild-eyed gaze darting up to appraise her. 

“Agent May!” A lopsided (and not entirely sincere) grin spread across his thin lips. “Fancy seeing you here.”

She studied him intently as she approached—the purple-ish bags under his eyes, the questionable-looking stains littering his white T-shirt (emblazoned with the 'NASA’ logo atop a black-and-white portrait of space from a moon-bound perspective), the bedraggled appearance of his unruly close-cropped hair. 

“Did you sleep at all last night?” she questioned suspiciously, crossing her arms against her chest. 

His grin widened, his expression bordering-on maniacal as he pointed a double-headed lug wrench in her direction. 

“No, Agent May, I did not,” he said decisively without a hint of apology. “ _But!_ I _did_ start F.R.I.D.A.Y. on an intensive search into Little Red’s background, draw up some new and improved specs for the Mark 66,” (Melinda didn’t bother asking), “ _and_ touched base with some contacts who may be able to help.”

Melinda raised an eyebrow, willing the knee-jerk suspicion roiling in her gut not to show. “‘Help’?”

“With Anastasia,” Stark clarified, shoving the double-ended lug wrench into the back pocket of his jeans and reaching for a white coffee mug sitting nearby that read ‘WORLD’S #1 GRANDPA’ in blocky black print. “Director Eyepatch. The Red Room.”

“You seem to know a lot about all this,” she observed, making a concerted effort to keep her tone non-accusatory. “Certainly more than I do—that’s for sure.”

Stark hummed, taking a large gulp from his mug. “You ever heard of the Winter Soldier, Agent May?”

“Sergeant Barnes,” she answered immediately. She thought back to the fall of S.H.I.E.L.D., Secretary Ross and the Accords, the three-man battle at Siberia which left Fury’s treasured Avengers Initiative in pieces—events that felt like a lifetime ago (but were really more like a year or two); events that Melinda was _very_ glad she’d managed to keep herself more or less separate from. “Last I heard, you two weren’t exactly close.”

“He killed my parents, Agent May.” Say what you would about Tony Stark; he didn’t pull his punches. (Melinda liked that about him.) “And he was brainwashed, sure. Wasn’t his idea. Rest assured I know that, but—"

“It doesn’t change that it happened,” Melinda finished for him. 

He nodded, flashing her a contemplative look as he set his mug to the side. “Brownie points for you, Agent May.” Melinda fought the urge to roll her eyes. “But either way, it doesn’t do me any good being on Rogers’ shit-list. No matter what went down between us, or how much it hurt, he’s a good guy, and… well, it seems like good guys are in rather short supply these days.”

“That’s an understatement,” Melinda agreed with a good-natured scoff (Fury’s face appearing in her mind along with a white-hot flare of anger), and Stark’s lopsided smirk returned (somewhat). “So you’re friends now, you and Rogers?”

Stark pursed his lips, looking thoughtful. “Not quite,” he said eventually, though his tone held no hint of anger—just weary resignation. “But we’re on the same side again, and that was more than I could’ve hoped for a year ago. If Spangles ever calls for help, I’ll provide it, and I know he’ll do the same for me.”

“And Barnes?”

“The Manchurian Candidate and I? We’re… " he shrugged noncommittally, then made a ‘so-so’ gesture with his hand, "okay. Some days I can’t help but hate him with everything I have, and some days I don’t hate him quite so much. It’s a… work in progress.”

“Forgiveness always is,” Melinda offered. 

“Yeah.” Stark nodded. He looked distracted for a moment before his expression cleared, bloodshot brown eyes swiftly regaining their sense of alertness as they fixated upon her. “But we’re civil with each other when our paths cross, and I’m working on it. We both are.”

“And you think he can help us with Natasha.”

Stark’s brow furrowed. “Who?”

“The girl.”

If Stark thought anything about Melinda calling her by name (particularly the more intimate diminutive of her given name, though she wasn’t sure he knew that) rather than ‘Ms. Romanova,’ he did a good job of hiding it. 

“Yeah, I do. I won’t give them our location or any super specific details unless you’re on board with it, too, but I also wouldn’t have bothered reaching out to them in the first place if I didn’t really believe they could help us get a better picture of what we’re working with here.”

Melinda nodded slowly, taking a moment to process everything. “How exactly are Rogers and Barnes connected with Natasha?” 

“Barnes is. Steve isn’t, but it’s a hell of a lot easier to get Barnes on board if Rogers is with it, too.”

“And how certain are you Barnes has information that might help?” Melinda wouldn’t sign off on _shit_ unless it had a better chance of helping the girl than hurting her. They may not know one another very well (yet), but Natasha had been through more than enough. 

“Pretty damn certain,” Stark said, rubbing introspectively at his beard, “considering he’s the one who trained her.”

— —

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> we need more melinda & nat works out there just saying


	4. pain tolerance

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It was quiet for a solid thirty seconds (Melinda counted each and every one in her head), before Natasha finally spoke, tentative but firm: “You are both very strange.”
> 
> Stark snickered loudly at that, and Melinda felt herself crack a smile. 
> 
> “You’re probably right,” Melinda mused, warmth blooming in her chest when Natasha’s lips twitched into the beginnings of what might’ve been a smile before her expression again turned blank.
> 
> “… Can we eat now?”

Lunch was fried fish tacos (served with homemade coleslaw and fresh pico de gallo), courtesy of Stark. She hadn’t known the man could cook, and she’d told him as much as she watched him prepare their food. 

“Don’t get used to it,” he’d told her, a lopsided grin pulling at his thin lips. “This is one of three dishes I can manage to make without burning something. Any other future ideas for culinary creations are gonna have to come from you and the little one.”

Melinda had found herself smiling back despite herself before she could think to hold back. “Duly noted,” she countered, then added: "Also, she’s really not that little.”

“Speaking of, where _is_ Manchurian Candidate Jr.? I haven’t seen her around since last night.”

“Throwing knives in Training Room A, last I checked.”

He raised a single brow at her, using a single wooden chopstick to poke the thin strips of white fish meat frying in a stovetop pan. “You sure that’s wise?”

Melinda shrugged, keeping her expression neutral. “If we’re right about what Fury did to her, there’s likely a prime directive in her conditioning that renders her incapable of hurting me.”

Stark gave her a pointed look. “‘Likely.’”

“She hasn’t tried to kill either of us yet, Stark, and she’s had numerous opportunities to do so,” Melinda pointed out. “Besides, if she really wanted to cross us off, I doubt she’d need a knife. She could just as easily do it with her bare hands.”

“That's…. cheery."

“Par for the course, no?”

“Point taken.”

They fell into silence for the next minute or so—the hiss of cooking oil and the occasional muttered curse from Stark the only sound to be heard in the modest dining space. 

It was nice, almost. 

Melinda didn’t trust him (not by a long shot), but for now, their interests seemed to align. For now, they could be allies.

(Truth be told, she could use a couple of those right about now.)

Eventually, when Stark had a large plate nearly filled with golden-brown fish meat and various flour tortillas heating on the griddle (along with a bowl of tossed coleslaw in the fridge), she pushed herself off the counter and checked the time on her S.H.I.E.L.D.-issue phone—13:04. 

“Should I go and get Natasha,” she asked, shutting off her phone and sliding it into the back pocket of her jeans, "or do you think it’ll be a little longer?"

Stark paused for a second, scanning the kitchen space—taking stock of what he’d cooked thus far. “Yeah, go ahead and grab her—it’ll be five minutes, maybe. Ten at most.”

“Copy that,” she answered, only slightly in jest as she turned on her heel and strode off in search of the training rooms. 

It was a relatively modest-sized floor (at least, modest where Tony Stark was concerned), and Training Room A was a short walk from the kitchen—maybe a minute or so. 

Two right turns, then a left—first doorway (door-less like Natasha’s quarters) on the right.

She was still learning the lay of the land, as it were, but she’d done a quick patrol just last night. She now had the entire layout more or less memorized, though it was always much easier to formulate a picture in your mind than it was to apply what you knew to on-the-ground navigation in real time. 

As she approached, she made a concerted effort to muffle her footfalls—which wasn’t terribly hard in socks (she’d left her running shoes back by the dining room table), but nonetheless required some degree of deliberation. Where the smallest noise wouldn’t typically reveal her to someone like Stark (relatively untrained) or even one more seasoned such as Daisy or Trip, she couldn’t count on the same broad margin of error with Natasha. 

The girl was _good_. 

(After all, if you were proficient enough to have a grown top-level agent like Hawkeye—tasked with taking the Widow in or out by whatever means necessary—chasing his own tail for over a year trying to get at you… well. 

She wasn’t just good; she was the _best_.)

At exactly one step from the open doorway, she stopped. 

She could hear short pants of winded breath, quick (and nearly soundless) syncopated footfalls sounding rhythmically against the mats, a hard _thunk_ as a throwing knife sank itself into the solid wood of a target. 

Most of it was normal—save for the fact that the cordoned-off range for projectiles was built on polished cement flooring, but Natasha’s feet hadn’t been on the cement when she’d thrown her knife. 

That meant that (from what Melinda had heard), Natasha had just flung a _throwing knife_ from the _mats_ , and likely at a near-impossible angle. Such was the design of the training space in order to minimize the probability of stray bullets and knives endangering the people lifting weights and sparring on the mats. 

Curious, she turned the corner, resting her shoulder against the entry way as she took in the scene before her. 

Natasha stood near the edge of the mats in the left corner of the room (her gaze snapped quickly to Melinda as she made her presence known), glistening with sweat and chest heaving for breath. 

While Natasha stood in one corner, the wooden targets hung not terribly far from the opposite corner. Natasha’s knife had sunken itself blade-first into the very heart of the target closest to the corner, though its handle slanted in a strange direction—directly back toward where Natasha stood, implying she’d managed a dead-on strike, _diagonally_ , a good 70 feet (~21 meters) across.

“Impressive throw,” she lauded. 

Natasha’s lips twitched (the closest she’d gotten to a smile that Melinda had seen), her cheeks flushed (though whether from pride or exertion, she couldn’t tell). “Thank you,” she said quietly, then tilted her head curiously at Melinda, an inquisitive look flitting across her features.

“It’s lunch time,” Melinda provided, answering the girl’s unspoken question. 

The girl frowned, tucking back a strand of stray red hair that’d managed to escape her ponytail. “Lunch?”

Melinda nodded, her brain working (fruitlessly) to understand the girl’s apparent confusion. “Yes, Natasha, lunch. You’ve been here all morning, and your body needs to refuel.”

Natasha paused, then nodded, eyeing Melinda with scarcely-concealed suspicion in her gaze. “… Okay,” she relented eventually, then nodded her head towards the skewered target across the room. “I should go retrieve the knife.”

Melinda nodded again at that to show she heard, sensing that the girl wanted a moment alone. “Stark and I will be back in the kitchen—he made fish tacos. You remember where it is?”

“I do.”

“Okay. See you in a few.”

— — 

She’d just finished setting the table for the three of them with an ever-chatty Tony Stark when Natasha appeared, approaching them with cautious and measured steps… Though there was something off about her, Melinda thought. 

She eyed the girl intently. Her pale forehead glistened with hard-earned sweat. She wore a fresh pair of S.H.I.E.L.D.-issue black running shorts and a matching tee, its cotton material plastered to the side of her abdomen and soaked through with… 

“Natasha,” she said sternly, effectively stopping the girl in her tracks. “Is that blood?”

She felt Stark stiffen beside her. 

The girl blinked owlishly at the question, looking down to her stomach for a moment before returning her questioning gaze to Melinda’s. “Yes. From training,” she stated simply, like that was obvious.

_Training?!_ “You were training _alone_ ,” Melinda objected flatly. “Lift your shirt.”

Instantly, the girl complied, pulling up the hem of her shirt to reveal her slim waist and the flat of her pale belly. There, on the left side of her stomach just beneath her ribcage, a shallow stab wound punctured her milky-pale skin, the irritated pinkish skin around it smeared with crimson blood. The gash oozed as they watched. 

“Okay, so that’s disgusting,” Stark asserted, a horrified look contorting his lined features. “But more importantly: what the _hell_ , Little Red?”

Melinda pointedly tamped down on the part of her that agreed with Stark, the part that wanted to know what the _hell_ Natasha was thinking. Right now, they had a stab wound to treat. 

Explanations could (and _would_ ) come later. 

“Are you wearing a bra?”

Natasha nodded distractedly, confused green eyes darting from Melinda to Stark and back again as if attempting to understand their reactions. “Yes.”

“Good. Shirt off; bundle it up and use it to put pressure on the wound,” she ordered, silently willing herself not to lose her temper. 

Instantly, Natasha was doing as she was told (though she still looked confused): pulling at the hem of her shirt with both hands and tugging it over her head, then wadding up the shirt in her hands and pressing it firmly against the wound. 

(Melinda caught sight of various old injuries evidenced across her thin torso as she did—a bullet wound above her right hip, a small but thick gash about an inch in length beneath her left shoulder… a small fraction of the damage she’d likely sustained over the past decade, as her enhanced healing would ensure the most minimal amount of scarring for even bordering-on fatal wounds.)

“I will heal,” she informed them as she stood before them in a black sports bra and little else bleeding from a self-inflicted stab wound to the gut, like that somehow made it better. 

Melinda wanted to hit something. “That’s not the _point_ , Natasha. Stark, we need—"

“First-aid kit,” he finished for her, then promptly scampered off into the kitchen, flinging open the cabinet just beneath the sink. He re-emerged a second later with a large plastic container emblazoned with a red Swiss cross. “Bingo."

Melinda, meanwhile, yanked out a wooden chair from the table, turning it towards a motionless Natasha and jabbing her pointer finger at the seat. 

“Sit.”

She did, without hesitation. That was something, Melinda supposed. 

Small victories, right?

— — 

“Now,” Melinda declared when they’d sterilized, glued, and bandaged the wound of an almost (emphasis on the word ‘almost’) contrite-looking Natasha, then sat her down at the table across from herself and Stark. “What the _hell_ were you thinking?"

The girl frowned slightly, shifting in her seat. She wore one of Melinda’s spare tops—a black Metallica T-shirt emblazoned with electric guitars and bleeding skulls beneath the band’s namesake in bright-red font. Stark had raised an eyebrow when she'd emerged with it from her quarters and thrust it into Natasha’s hands, though he wisely kept his mouth shut about it. 

Melinda _refused_ to feel even a sliver of fondness at the sight of it. 

“I was training,” she repeated eventually. 

“Yeah, you mentioned,” Stark quipped sardonically even as Melinda fought the urge to heave a sigh. 

“You stabbed yourself,” she pointed out instead, doing her very best to keep her tone neutral. 

“Yes. My pain tolerance has lessened significantly since—"

“So you _stabbed_ yourself?!” Stark exclaimed, gesturing wildly about with either hand. 

The girl nodded, her gaze darting back and forth between the two of them. “Yes,” she concurred plainly, still very clearly not quite grasping their alarm. “So that if I am injured in the field, it will not hinder my efficiency.”

Melinda pinched the bridge of her nose, letting out a long exhale. “Natasha, that’s… that's not how we do things here."

Natasha was quiet for a moment. “It will heal.”

“So you’ve said,” Stark snapped.

“I don't understand your reactions,” Natasha confessed after another tense moment of quiet, wide-eyed curiosity splayed clearly across her features. (A rare moment of relative transparency for her. Melinda only wished it weren’t making itself known under such decidedly less-than-ideal circumstances.) “My field proficiency will not be impeded by this; it will heal in two days at the most, and will have no lasting adverse effects on my performance—"

“We care because you’re a person, not a weapon,” Melinda interjected quietly, unwilling to hear any more. “Honestly, I don’t give a damn about your ‘performance’ right now. I know you could kill me right here, right now, if you really wanted to.” Natasha’s brow furrowed at that. “And there’s no ‘mission’ for the foreseeable future, either. There’s no ‘mission’ at _all_ if you don’t want there to be, no matter what Fury says.”

“I’m gonna rip that _stupid_ eyepatch off his face,” Stark grumbled in something like acquiesce. Melinda couldn’t help but picture it and feel an inane twinge of amusement ripple through her. 

“It’s about finding yourself, as cheesy as that sounds,” Melinda continued, holding Natasha’s unreadable gaze with her own. “It’s about deciding who it is _you_ want to be. I don’t care what Fury or your old handlers or anyone else put in your head. It’s _your_ decision, not anyone else’s.”

“Yeah,” Stark inputted in a muted tone, sounding rather exhausted all of a sudden. (Melinda couldn’t much blame him.) “What she said.”

It was quiet for a solid thirty seconds (Melinda counted each and every one in her head), before Natasha finally spoke, tentative but firm: “You are both very strange.”

Stark snickered loudly at that, and Melinda felt herself crack a smile. 

“You’re probably right,” Melinda mused, warmth blooming in her chest when Natasha’s lips twitched into the beginnings of what might’ve been a smile before her expression again turned blank.

“… Can we eat now?” 

— —

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> cole slaw is gross EXCEPT when it is in fish tacos. i am right and you cannot change my mind


	5. movie night

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The girl frowned slightly at Stark’s question, looking thoughtful as she wordlessly passed him her emptied plate. “They had us watch movies… sometimes.”
> 
> “What kind of movies?” Melinda asked lightly, her curiosity piqued. 
> 
> She didn’t ask who ’they’ were, and she was relieved beyond words could say that Stark didn’t either. 
> 
> “Russian films,” the girl said, brow furrowed in thought. “American ones, sometimes— _Snow White and the Seven Dwarves_.”

“Do you like movies?” Stark asked the girl offhandedly as they all worked to clear the table after a quiet lunch. 

Stark had scarfed down a good half of the fish meat, while Melinda had taken it up on herself to divvy up the rest evenly between herself and Natasha—she certainly wasn’t in any mood to spend the entire time ordering Natasha to eat a reasonable amount of food, especially not while they both had decidedly more pressing matters to worry themselves with; namely, the self-inflicted stab wound Natasha’s tiny body was likely working double-time to heal.

Enhanced or not, healing was a painstaking process (presumably even more so at an accelerated rate). 

Melinda didn’t much like the idea of the girl straining herself any more than strictly necessary while her wound healed. 

The girl frowned slightly at Stark’s question, looking thoughtful as she wordlessly passed him her emptied plate. “They had us watch movies… sometimes.”

“What kind of movies?” Melinda asked lightly, her curiosity piqued. 

She didn’t ask who ’they’ were, and she was relieved beyond words could say that Stark didn’t either. 

“Russian films,” the girl said, brow furrowed in thought. “American ones, sometimes— _Snow White and the Seven Dwarves_.”

That caught Melinda’s attention. “They had you watch Disney movies?”

The girl shrugged, fiddling with her hands. “It helped us learn English, I think.”

“Did you like watching them?” 

Natasha nodded slowly, a slightly dazed look in her eyes. “Yes… I think I did.”

“That settles it,” Stark announced, shutting the dishwasher and pressing a series of buttons beneath the countertop to get it started. “We’re having movie night, starting now.”

“It’s 2:00pm, Stark.”

“Tony,” he corrected. She rolled her eyes. “C’mon, it’ll be fun! We can watch _X-Men_ or _Harry Potter_ or—Oh, _Mean Girls_! Can we _please_ —” 

“What about training?” Natasha asked then, causing them both to turn and fix her with matching glares. 

“Is she kidding?” Stark questioned testily, turning to Melinda. “I genuinely can’t tell.”

“She’d better be,” Melinda said flatly, a clear warning in her tone.

“Look, kid, there’s no ‘training’—"

“I’m not a child.”

“Right, right, you’re Italian marble. Unbreakable,” Stark countered sarcastically, rolling his eyes. “Whatever. Potato, potat-oh.”

Natasha opened her mouth to argue, the briefest hint of anger flaring momentarily in her gaze, but Melinda beat her to it:

“You’re not training until you’ve healed. _Fully_ ,” she said decisively. “That’s non-negotiable.”

Natasha pursed her lips at that but nodded slowly, _finally_ relenting. 

_Small victories_ , Melinda reminded herself. 

“Wonderful!” Stark declared, clasping his hands together. “Now, let’s do a show of hands—all those in favor of watching _Mean Girls_ first?”

— — 

Half past midnight saw the three of them finishing _Despicable Me_ in the main lounge—empty pizza boxes strewn across the floor, a droopy-eyed Natasha sitting cross-legged on the floor and staring at the final scene (the protagonist Gru joining his yellow minions and recently adopted wards in a rowdy celebratory dance-off) with slack-jawed wonder, an open-mouthed and snoring Tony Stark star-fished slackly across the sofa while Melinda tried to force as many pieces of popcorn into his chasmic mouth as she could without waking him. 

Her phone buzzed as the credits began to roll alongside a poppy tune she thought she might’ve recognized, causing her to (reluctantly) abandon her ‘shoving popcorn into Stark’s mouth' endeavor in favor of fishing out her phone from the back pocket of her jeans. 

“F.R.I.D.A.Y., can you pause the movie please?” she called out gently. A second later, the screen froze and the upbeat music stopped. “Thanks,” she whispered toward the ceiling, careful not to wake Stark beside her as she eyed the most recent notification displayed upon the screen.

It was a sparsely-worded text from an unknown sender: 

‘Ask asset about memories of a chair. Let’s go dancing sometime soon, okay?

0 representatives.’

Phil. It had to be. 

The mention of ‘dancing,’ something he knew very well she loathed to love (a reference to their fundraising excursion of years past in Miami, Florida); the phrase '0 representatives,’ a code they often used to mean 'do not reply’ (which might imply the line of communication was or had the potentiality to be compromised)… and mentions of a chair. 

_That_ part wasn’t code, though it was certainly something new. 

Interesting. 

Shutting her phone off and setting it to the side, she looked up to find Natasha unabashedly watching her, head tilted curiously to one side. 

“A friend in S.H.I.E.L.D.,” she explained, though Natasha hadn’t asked. “Someone I trust."

Building trust—that was the name of the game, right?

“A man or a woman?” Natasha asked after a moment, her voice rough with fatigue. 

If she felt taken aback by the question (which she did), she didn’t let on. “A man. One I’ve known for a very long time.”

“Not the one-eyed man,” Natasha clarified, though there was a questioning air to it, as if asking for confirmation. 

“No,” Melinda agreed. “Not him.”

Silence fell between the two of them—not exactly the comfortable kind, but not entirely unpleasant, either. 

“It’s late, Natasha,” Melinda spoke eventually, stifling a yawn. “You should get some sleep.”

The girl nodded, still watching her intently. “And you?”

“I’m gonna make sure Stark gets to bed,” she said, jerking a thumb over to the snoring man in question, a piece of popcorn falling from his near-overflowing mouth to bounce across his clothed chest and settle just beneath the translucent glow of his arc reactor as they watched. "Then I’ll probably turn in, too.”

The girl nodded once more, getting swiftly to her feet. “Would you like me to help clean up, first?”

Melinda shook her head, waving a dismissive hand through the air. “No, Natasha, it’s okay—but thank you for offering.” She paused then, giving the pale girl a meaningful look. “Do try and sleep tonight, though, okay? We’ll have a late breakfast tomorrow morning—9:00am sharp.”

“I will, May,” the girl said quietly, then, rather than leaving, opted instead to linger awkwardly in place as if trying to work up the courage to say something. 

Melinda dutifully waited her out. 

Eventually, she spoke—softly, so softly Melinda had to strain to hear: “Thank you.”

Melinda felt a slow smile spread across her cheeks. She didn’t ask the girl to clarify what her thanks were for; she was pretty sure she already knew. 

“You’re welcome, Natasha. I’ll see you in the morning, okay?”

She didn’t think she was imagining the slight flush that rose to the girl’s alabaster cheeks, then, just barely visible in the soft glow of the television screen. 

Either way, she didn’t see it for long; a half a second later, Natasha was turning on her heel and traipsing soundlessly out of sight—around the corner and down the nearest hallway, presumably (hopefully) in search of her quarters. 

They’d made progress today, she thought— _real_ progress (though she was understandably hesitant to take it at face value, much less trust it). 

Still, progress was progress, and she’d take as much of it as she could get. 

— — 

She started awake sometime in the night—3:24am, according to the touch-screen tablet sitting atop the coffee table. 

Her surroundings were a bit unfamiliar—a large television mounted on the wall just up ahead (its screen dark), the smell of stale pizza and burnt popcorn lingering in the air, a loudly snoring lump of warmth lying next to her on the sofa… 

_The lounge_ , she realized after a moment. 

She took in her surroundings with bleary eyes, not bothering to stifle the yawn that escaped her all the while. 

The emptied pizza boxes had inexplicably vanished along with every stray piece of popcorn that had once littered the ground (the ones in Stark’s mouth likely having been eaten by the man in his sleep), and the television remote (which had been sitting on an empty grease-stained pizza box) was placed neatly on the coffee table alongside Stark’s tablet. 

Frowning to herself, she rose from the couch, taking great care not to disturb Stark where he slept. 

“F.R.I.D.A.Y.,” she whispered, moving out the lounge and across the atrium on bare feet, angling her path towards the kitchen. (She would kill for a steaming hot cup of tea right now.) “Where’s Natasha?"

She hoped Stark was a heavy enough sleeper that he wouldn’t awaken when F.R.I.D.A.Y. answered back in a notably muted tone: “She is currently in the ventilation shafts just overhead from where you are standing, Agent May. She comes out to patrol the entire floor every 30 minutes like clockwork.”

Melinda fought the desire to smack her forehead and groan audibly at the new information. ( _So much for progress_.)

Instead, she heaved a quiet sigh. “Thank you, F.R.I.D.A.Y.,” she said tiredly. 

“My pleasure.”

“Natasha?” she called out next, allowing her voice to raise just the tiniest notch above a whisper. “I know you can hear me. Come out, please.”

A second passed in silence. 

Then another. 

She leveled at hard stare up at a rectangular 15” x 10” (if she had to guess) silver-plated ventilation grate built into the ceiling just over a tall granite countertop (complemented by three wooden bar stools), crossing her arms stubbornly against her chest. 

“ _Now_ , Natasha.”

She heard a faint shuffling sound (though it echoed louder against the shafts) followed by the telltale scrape of metal on metal—the girl was likely undoing the bolts that secured the grate in place. 

Melinda waited patiently for her to finish. 

Ten seconds later, the grate was pulled up and out of sight. 

A second after that, a pair of small soot-stained feet appeared to dangle out from the opening, and Melinda wondered briefly if she should offer to help the girl get down. 

A half a second passed, and she thought better of it:

In a blur, the girl dropped down from the small rectangular opening up above, landing cat-like upon the polished granite countertop without a sound. 

Her clothes (a S.H.I.E.L.D.-issued pair of athletic shorts and Melinda’s graphic Metallica T-shirt) were dusty and creased in odd places, there was a streak of blackened soot running diagonally across her left cheekbone, and she held small throwing knives tightly in either hand. 

There were slight bags beneath her eyes, faint purplish bruising that Melinda was sure she hadn’t seen before; and yet, her green eyes were wide and alert, darting this way and that, constantly cataloguing her immediate surroundings. 

All in all, she looked to be alright (if not slightly worse for wear). 

Melinda felt the worry in her chest ease (somewhat). 

“Natasha,” she uttered once she’d gathered her wits about her, careful not to spook the girl. “Get down from the counter, please. And set the knives down.”

Natasha blinked wordlessly up at her for a moment but nonetheless moved to obey, hopping down from the counter to land atop smooth cement flooring (again, without making a single sound); then, she was rising on her tippie-toes (something Melinda categorically _refused_ to find cute, given the circumstances) to set either throwing knife atop the bar counter, as requested. 

Fighting the urge to heave another sigh, Melinda simply gave the girl a tired nod before making her way around the bar and into the kitchen—she was definitely going to need something stronger than tea for this conversation, and if what she’d just witnessed was any indication, Natasha would be needing it, too. 

(And maybe it was irresponsible to give this tiny girl who couldn’t possibly be older than 13 a cup of coffee, but she figured it was all relative. 

After all, she’d read Barton’s reports on his hunt for the Black Widow—even written up a few of them herself as he reiterated the events to her from his usual spot sprawled across her office floor, because the archer was just that incorrigibly lazy. 

Makeup and revealing clothing did wonders where she was concerned, such that the places Barton often reported finding her in were high-class bars and glamorous fundraising galas and five-star hotel rooms with high-ranked diplomats—in other words, everywhere and anywhere a 13-year-old girl had absolutely no business being. 

So in the realm of Natasha’s history—expensive cocktails and Dragunov sniper rifles and intimate encounters with sleazy middle-aged men that should’ve damn well known better—she thinks that offering the girl a cup of coffee at 3:00am on her umpteenth sleepless night in S.H.I.E.L.D. custody couldn’t possibly do any real harm.)

She felt the girl’s eyes burning a hole through her as she set about filling the coffee pot with water to the second white line, then blindly scooped what looked like a reasonable amount of coffee grounds into the top compartment. 

Rubbing any remaining sleep from her eyes, she secured the coffee pot back against the machine, then pressed random buttons until a tiny red light blinked back up at her, and the water began to brew. (She’d ask F.R.I.D.A.Y. or Stark to explain how it worked later.)

“C’mon,” she beckoned to Natasha, nodding towards the dining room table. “Let’s sit.”

She suppressed a smile when Natasha immediately sat in her usual spot. 

Melinda followed in kind, sitting at the head of the table just adjacent to the girl and fixing her with an inquisitive look. 

“So,” she began, then winced at the gravelly sound of her voice. “Patrol, huh?”

Natasha nodded. “I must ensure you are secure at all times.”

“Because I’m your handler?”

“Yes,” Natasha replied definitively, sounding for all the world as if she were stating the painfully obvious. “While you sleep, I keep watch.”

“And when do _you_ sleep?”

Natasha frowned slightly. “I sleep in between patrols.”

“That’s not enough.”

“They trained me for this.” Melinda could already tell she really didn’t want to ask what this ’training’ involved. "I can go a long time without sleep.”

“That doesn’t mean you should,” Melinda pointed out. 

“So you want me… " Natasha said slowly, clearly struggling to understand, “… to sleep at the same time you do? At night?”

“Yes,” she answered without hesitation, fiercely battling the frustration mounting in her gut. “Yes, that’s exactly what I want you to do.”

“Then who will ensure that you are secure?”

She made a show of contemplating it for a long moment (in order to show the girl that she was indeed taking the issue of her own security very seriously), before saying, “F.R.I.D.A.Y. Or me—I’m a light sleeper. Or even Stark… he’s up during all sorts of ungodly times in the night.” The wrinkle in Natasha’s brow didn’t ease. “Look, Natasha—either way, it isn’t your job to check up on me and safeguard our floor for potential threats. I appreciate the sentiment, of course, but it’s more important to me that you sleep… preferably at least 8 hours each night."

Natasha nodded slowly, her posture rigid. “And this… this is not a test?”

“No, Natasha,” Melinda assured her. “This isn’t a test.”

Another nod. 

The coffee maker began beeping loudly, then (loudly enough to make her worry it might awaken Stark even from across the atrium). 

Rolling her eyes, she rose and hurried over to grab the coffee pot from its port (which thankfully then terminated the shrill sound). 

“Would you like some coffee?” she asked as she busied herself with rummaging through the cupboards. 

“If there is enough,” came the girl’s quiet response. 

Nodding to herself, she grabbed two generic-looking white ceramic mugs from the shelves. “Sugar? Milk?”

“No, thank you.”

Melinda poured out two cups, then left the just less than half-empty pot in its place. 

When she returned to the table with two steaming mugs of plain coffee, the girl hadn’t moved an inch. (Melinda supposed she couldn’t have expected anything less.)

She murmured out a quiet, “Thank you” as Melinda placed one mug before her then settled back in her own seat, coffee-filled mug clasped snugly between either hand. 

She thought back to Phil’s text from earlier: ‘Ask asset about memories of a chair.’

‘Memories of a chair.’ 

His use of the word ‘memories’ was intentional, she knows, rather than saying ‘Ask asset if they recall a chair’ or something of the like. It wasn’t terribly telling, but it did imply what she and Stark had suspected since yesterday—that this chair or machine (or whatever Fury had exploited to alter Natasha’s perception) dealt principally in memories… erasing, editing, fabricating them entirely anew.

“Can I ask you something?” she found herself asking aloud before she could think better of it. 

The girl’s brow furrowed again, as if perplexed that Melinda would give her the option, but eventually she spoke: “Yes.”

Melinda eyed the polished wooden tabletop in the darkness, pondering how exactly she should go about asking. 

“What do you remember about being held captive in S.H.I.E.L.D. before we met?” Natasha raised a brow at that, though it could’ve been for any number of reasons—if Melinda had to guess, it was at her use of the wording ‘held captive’ rather than something gentler, something that fundamentally absolved S.H.I.E.L.D. of the blame they were due. Regardless, Melinda had never been one for sugar-coating; she didn’t intend to start now. "Any and every detail you can remember, even if they don’t form a complete picture.”

“There is a gap in the time before you came… " the girl explained moderately, distance creeping into her gaze. “Before that, it is more comprehensive, but not quite clear. There is… a square-shaped room made of stone. My cell. Drugs pumped into the air to make me sleep. Puncture marks at the crook of my elbow when I wake. A collar around my neck that stings when I disobey.” She paused then, taking small sips of coffee with an impressive air of indifference about her that made Melinda’s stomach churn.

“A man in a white coat comes every day in the afternoon. A doctor. The uneven tan around his face says he most always wears glasses, but he isn’t wearing them when he sees me. They think the glasses could be made into a weapon at my disposal. They are not wrong. He asks me questions about the Red Room. He is not a very good interrogator, and I learn much more about him over the course of our time together than he does about me.”

“The one-eyed man comes in after a month. He says that we can do this the hard way, or the even harder way. He asks me why I allowed Hawkeye to take me in. I tell him I wanted to die at the hands of someone better. He does not believe me, and I learn what the ‘harder way’ entails.”

“They break both arms and legs and every one of my fingers, yet my answer does not change. The one-eyed man still does not believe me.” Melinda couldn’t help but think she was getting the PG-13 version of what exactly had happened; she couldn't decide if that was preferable or just annoying. “I meet a woman who introduces herself as Agent Hill, and she takes me to my first round of treatments.”

Well, didn’t _that_ sound ominous. “Treatments?” Melinda questioned. 

Natasha nodded to indicate she’d heard, though her gaze remained unwaveringly distant. “This is where my memory begins to get… choppy. I see a doctor, a different one from before. I see the one-eyed man, and a tropical island with sandy beaches. It’s pretty.” _Tahiti_ , Melinda’s brain supplied numbly. "I see a picture of an East Asian woman. Her name is Melinda May and she is my handler. I don’t know how I know that, but I know it and it is true.” Natasha stopped entirely, then, shaking her head slightly as if to clear it. 

There was a glazed-over look in her eyes, and for a fraction of a second she looked lost…. confused, though it came and went far too quickly for Melinda to make a reasonable assessment about it.

Melinda briefly wondered where she'd gone just then—back to S.H.I.E.L.D., maybe. Or Russia, even. 

She didn’t ask; she’d already been privileged enough to hear Natasha speak more words in the last five minutes than she'd said throughout the entirety of yesterday, and she was loathe to push her luck any further. 

(Even if the reason Natasha responded so willingly to her probing was likely due to the fabricated loyalty she felt toward Melinda as a direct result of Fury’s re-conditioning rather than anything else.

_Progress was progress_ , she reminded herself.) 

“Do you remember _how_ they altered your memory?” she inquired carefully. “Perhaps there was a machine, or a drug.” _Or a chair._

“I remember a chair,” she said after a brief moment. _Bingo_. “My head often bled when they strapped me in."

Melinda nodded, sipping contemplatively at her coffee. It didn’t taste like anything. “Did you recognize the technology?”

Natasha pursed her lips but nodded. “Yes. It was very similar to what they used in Russia.”

“In the Red Room.” 

Melinda fought the desire to wince as a murderous look flitted briefly across Natasha’s gaze. “Yes.”

“Do you know if it’s reversible?”

Natasha blinked—once, then twice, evident puzzlement lingering on her features for two long seconds before promptly disappearing. “I’m not sure.”

“Wonderful,” Melinda sighed, taking a long pull of tasteless coffee from her mug. “Then I suppose we’d better find out.”

— —


	6. vienna

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “I didn’t go running this morning,” Natasha pointed out. 
> 
> “Very impressive,” Melinda lauded flatly. "Would you like a sticker?”
> 
> Natasha’s frown deepened. “A sticker?”
> 
> Melinda sighed testily, pinching the bridge of her nose. _I’ve been spending too much time with Stark_ , she thought.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> did nOt realize how much i'd like writing tony into this dynamic with nat and may 
> 
> crazy stuff

“What did I say about strenuous activities?” Melinda demanded from the doorless entry way of Natasha’s quarters, fixing the girl in question with a hard glare. 

Natasha, for her part, sat entirely unapologetic in the center of her minimalist bedroom—cross-legged in a pair of black S.H.I.E.L.D.-issue leggings and a matching sports bra, alabaster-pale skin glistening with hard-earned sweat beneath the harsh fluorescent lighting. 

(Though she was wearing what looked to be a fresh bandage covering the wound on the left of her abdomen just beneath her ribcage. 

That was something, Melinda supposed.)

“Push-ups and aerobics training is hardly 'strenuous,’” the girl disputed with a single raised brow, alert green eyes glimmering with something like amusement. 

(Were this not the fifth time today F.R.I.D.A.Y. had interrupted her and Stark’s investigative deep-dive into Natasha’s background—what precious little of it they could find—she might’ve been somewhat morbidly pleased at this new argumentative side of the girl making itself known, an undeniable step up from the blind deference she’d exhibited thus far. 

As it was, she was running on very little sleep and a probably inadvisable amount of coffee, not to mention the fact that she’d already spent the last five consecutive hours glued to Tony Stark’s side in the most frustrating, impossible search of her entire life. 

Which, considering her long and storied past, was saying something. 

The Red Room was a rumor. The Winter Soldier, a ghost story. 

The Black Widow? Well. That presented a separate problem entirely. 

See, the issue there wasn’t the _lack_ of intelligence; rather, it was the exorbitance of it. 

The number of unproven allegations was somewhere in the hundred thousands going back as early as World War I, while the number of eyewitness accounts—all unverified, of course—tallied somewhere in the high hundreds. 

The Black Widow had been _everywhere_ , it seemed, wearing the faces of a thousand different people, for over a century.

Melinda almost preferred researching the Winter Soldier, or зимой солдат— _zeemoy soldat_. In his case, at least, the wealth of information couldn’t overwhelm her, for there was simply so little to be found.

Needless to say, the whole thing was giving her an ear-splitting headache.)

“You’re sweating. What part of ‘rest until you’ve healed’ did you not understand?”

Natasha frowned, though a trace of her earlier beguilement remained. “I _am_ resting, like you said.”

Melinda fought the urge to snort. “Clearly, you and I have very different ideas of what that word means."

“I didn’t go running this morning,” Natasha pointed out. 

“Very impressive,” Melinda lauded flatly. "Would you like a sticker?”

Natasha’s frown deepened. “A sticker?”

Melinda sighed testily, pinching the bridge of her nose. _I’ve been spending too much time with Stark_ , she thought. “Never mind. Look, just—I’m serious about you taking it easy right now, okay?"

Natasha shrugged. “It doesn’t hurt.”

“I don’t believe you,” she countered matter-of-factly, and when the girl opened her mouth to argue, Melinda steamrolled on before she had the chance to get a word in, “and even if I did, I’d still insist that you rest until you’ve healed. Fully.”

Natasha was quiet for a moment. “There is not very much to do,” she observed eventually after a spell—not quite a complaint, but not _not_ one either. 

Melinda fought the inane urge to break into a smile at the realization. 

“You’re right,” she conceded instead. “Would you like to read a book, or color or something like that?”

“I’m not a child,” Natasha snapped instantly, and Melinda fought the urge to sigh. 

_One step forward, two steps back_.

“I never said you were,” she reasoned instead, making a concentrated effort to keep her tone light. “I read quite a lot, even books that come from the young adults’ section. I like coloring, too. Does that make me a child?”

The question was somewhat rhetorical, but she was pleased to hear Natasha answer it anyhow. “… No.”

Sensing that Natasha’s enduring stubbornness would prevail even after they’d established there was no logical rationale for it, she resolved to try a different tactic, instead: “Either way, I’ve been stuck with Stark for the last five hours—I need a break. And honestly, coloring sounds heavenly to me right about now. Will you join me?” 

It was rather transparent, this attempt at coaxing the girl into a leisurely pastime to supplant her compulsion to train. She didn’t at all expect it to escape the girl’s keen notice… but it established a pretense, one that was more trouble to contest than abide by, and she figured that that would be enough. 

It was. 

“Okay,” the girl capitulated (if not somewhat reluctantly). 

Melinda’s lips twitched. “C’mon. The supplies are in my room.”

— — 

Natasha was _great_ at coloring. (Which didn’t surprise Melinda in the slightest.)

Her strokes were firm, controlled, and of varying densities with respects to light source and natural complexion—which was particularly impressive, seeing as Melinda was using colored pencils, while Natasha had opted to draw with crayons. 

They were each making their way through a motley assortment of coloring books (pilfered from the stainless steel cupboards in one of Stark’s many auxiliary laboratories in the building). These sundry titles included—but were not in any way limited to— _The Incredible Hulk_ , _Batman: Gotham City’s Caped Crusader_ , _Iron Man_ (of course), _Contemporary American Rappers_ , _The Lord of the Rings: Coloring for Beginners_ , _DC Heroes & Villains_, _Greek Mythology_ , and _Color By Numbers: The Ultimate Coloring Edition_.

It was ~~a bit of~~ a sausage party, all things considered, though she hadn’t expected anything less. 

Currently, Melinda was working her way through a particularly therapeutic rural road landscape in the _Color By Numbers_ booklet, with lush green trees and golden-yellow sunlight peeking through the overgrown treetops. Natasha, meanwhile, had reluctantly selected the _Greek Mythology_ edition and was halfway through a meticulous (and colorful) embellishment of one Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love. 

A variety of familiar music played gently over the speakers from a Spotify playlist Melinda had created years earlier for one of her covers, and found herself carefully curating ever since. 

When “Vienna" by Billy Joel came on, she couldn’t help but hum along. 

_Slow down, you crazy child_  
_You’re so ambitious for a juvenile_  
_But then if you’re so smart, tell me_  
_Why are you still so afraid?_

It’d been a long time— _too_ long—since she’d given it a listen. Hearing it play so gently over the speakers felt a bit like coming home, as silly and sentimental as it sounded. 

Home wasn’t a place, nor was it a person; honestly, she hadn’t had a home in a very long time. 

And yet, the song felt like a piece of it just the same. 

_Where’s the fire, what’s the hurry about?_  
_You’d better cool it off before you burn it out_  
_You’ve got so much to do_  
_And only so many hours in the day_

She remembered hearing it for the very first time on Phil’s iPod Classic (3rd Generation): one Apple earbud in his left ear, the other in her right; her blood-soaked hands plugging a gaping wound in Phil’s left iliac region that wouldn’t stop _bleeding_ , God dammit; waiting for their (hopefully) imminent extraction in a room littered with corpses and silently praying that the perpetually chatty pain-in-her-ass man she’d only just begun allowing herself to like didn’t have to die on her, not yet. 

It really was a beautiful song, then and now. 

A murmured question from Natasha brought her back to the present—“This is the Piano Man, no?” she asked, a tinge of Russian influence seeping into her words. 

“Billy Joel,” she answered mildly with a nod, feeling the beginnings of a smile tugging at her lips. 

_You’ve got your passion, you’ve got your pride_  
_But don’t you know that only fools are satisfied?_  
_Dream on, but don’t imagine they’ll all come true_  
_When will you realize, Vienna waits for you?_

“I like it,” the girl said after a moment, though she didn’t glance up from her page. 

Melinda smiled to herself, delicately shading in the dense treetops with a parakeet-green colored pencil. “Me, too.”

— —

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> do yourself a massive favor and give "vienna" by billy joel a listen
> 
> it slaps

**Author's Note:**

> thots? comments? concerns?
> 
> pretty sure i'm gonna gonna plan to eventually do another part of this series sooner or later but we'll see 
> 
> (here's my [tumblr](https://psyches.co.vu/) or just search me up @ultralightdumbass to talk to me there!)


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